Sometimes in conversations about prison abolition, folks will talk about serial rapists and say (either explicitly or implicitly) that they think rapists should be imprisoned despite all the things wrong with prison because
they think that it will keep people safe from them
they think rapists deserve to be raped in prison
To address the first, I want to highlight the word “people.” We know that rape happens in prisons. We know it statistically, we know it from news stories, and we know it culturally so deeply that there is an entire genre of rape jokes about people being raped in prison. So when you are saying that sending rapists to prisons will keep “people” safe, what you mean is that it will keep free people safe, and instead further endanger incarcerated people. We need to depart from the denial that allows us to believe that when someone is incarcerated they disappear, that the social problems cease to exist when people are arrested. Incarcerated rapists still exist, they are still interacting with people, and if anything the highly controlling and abusive nature of prisons is an extremely amplified version of the rape culture that free society deals with and further enables sexual violence.
To address the second, I want to really unpack what this means to ideologically condone rape as a punishment. To believe rape can be used as a punishment means that there is such a thing as justifiable rape. That rape as an act is a neutral tool that can be used in the service of justice. That rape is something only morally wrong when used in the wrong circumstances. You need to understand that this idea is fundamentally in line with rape and abuse culture. The ideology that sexual violence is an acceptable tool of control is literally rape culture and rape apologism. If you are advocating this idea, even if you’re a survivor yourself, you are furthering the ideology that oppresses and endangers all of us.
i didn’t know these were arguments because i thought both of these points were fairly obvious but like where tf are we gonna put rapists then?